APA session: Advice for job candidates on the teaching demo

The APA Committee on Teaching Philosophy is seeking participants for a panel (Eastern meeting, January 2016, Washington DC) to advise job candidates on teaching demonstrations. The deadline to volunteer is August 17. More details here.

Talking the teaching talk, walking the teaching walk

UPDATE: I posted this a few years back, but thought that it would be timely to re-post it now, as on-campus interviews are in full swing. Any other ideas on how approach a teaching demo are very welcome in the comments!

Hiring season is on in the world of academic philosophy, and I thought a post on a common feature of the interviewing process might be welcome: the on-campus teaching presentation.

Many hiring institutions ask candidates to do a teaching presentation as a part of their on-campus interviews. This is especially true for institutions with a strong teaching focus. To my knowledge, the teaching presentation tends to come in one of two varieties:

A teaching demonstration is when you are asked to teach. Often, you are put in a class meeting for an existing course. Institutions vary in how much latitude they then provide you. In some cases, you may be given a syllabus and a description of the aims or objectives of the class meeting. In that case, you're sort of like a substitute teacher, covering the material the instructor would have regularly covered. In other cases, you are put in a course and given broader latitude to teach the material that interests you or seems appropriate. For example, the teaching demo I did for my present position took place in a philosophy of religion course in which the students had been studying the problem of evil. I do ethics rather than philosophy of religion, so I decided to focus the discussion on how various moral theories might explain why evil takes place (utilitarianism: lack of sympathy, virtue theory: poor moral development, Kantianism: wanting to exempt oneself from moral principles, Hobbesianism: failing to realize the cooperative benefits of being good, etc.). This seemed to work nicely, since it gave the students a fresh perspective on the problem of evil but still related to something they knew a little about.

Some small variations on this demonstration format:
You give a mock class to a random group of undergrads or an undergraduate philosophy club. You have more latitude here, since there's not a course to put bounds on the content.
You give a mock class to a group of faculty. This is very stupid and I wish institutions wouldn't do it. The faculty tend to do a terrible job pretending they are students, and the result tends to be, as you might expect, a philosophical conversation among the faculty.

My advice for teaching demonstrations:
1. Be enthusiastic. Obvious, but if you don't seem like a person who the hiring committee can imagine will enjoy teaching at their institution for, oh, four decades, they're not going to be enthusiastic about your candidacy.
2. Build in discussion, group activities, etc. -- don't make it a straight lecture. Show that you're at least open to something more/other than the 'sage on the stage' approach to teaching.
3. Stoke curiosity instead of settling controversies. I've seen candidates set up their demo by outlining a philosophical problem, describing solutions to the problem that they reject, and then offering their own solution (usually one thoroughly defended in their dissertation!). That's too graduate seminar-y. You're talking to undergrads here, and your main aim is to keep and retain their interest — better yet, to have them leave wishing you would come back. So end with questions, puzzles, etc., instead of with solutions.
4. It's not a research presentation. Don't make your own philosophical thinking the star of the show. You're teaching here, and your job is to facilitate learning.

The other sort of teaching presentation we'll call the teaching talk. Here you're not actually teaching. Instead, you're giving a presentation about some aspect of your teaching philosophy, approaches, or techniques. Here the audience will be faculty members, and often, faculty members from other disciplines or even administrators. With a teaching talk, the institution is looking less at how you teach, but how you think about how you teach. So the hope here is to appear conscientious, thoughtful, careful, and willing to learn more about teaching.

My advice on the teaching talk:
1. Be problem-oriented. Big picture stuff — your "teaching philosophy," your thoughts about the role of education in a democratic society — is nice, but doesn't tell people much about you as a teacher. Instead, pick a problem you encountered in your teaching, describe a solution that you found effective, and explain how and why it worked. The problem could be something like: Students had trouble with historical texts, students asked to revise their papers did so superficially, there wasn't much discussion in my classes, etc.
2. Show that you can learn how to teach. If you're interviewing for your first tenure track job, the hiring committee doesn't expect you to be a seasoned expert. But they'll want to know that you can reflect on your shortcomings and identify how to solve them and improve. So adopt a humble persona and end your talk, South Park-like, with a "here's what I learned about teaching from this experience".
3. Involve your audience. Leave time for questions and discussions at the end, and try to involve your audience in some way during the talk. Ask them to brainstorm ideas for solving the problem you wanted to tackle, or if you're more daring, do a role play with one of you in the student role and one in the instructor role.
4. Again, be enthusiastic. Show that teaching is something you find rewarding and care enough about that you will be happy you chose it as your career.

I'd be interested to hear stories about teaching presentations and how others have approached them, as well as advice for those who will be facing this task soon.

On Teaching Statements

Most philosophy instructors have had to produce a teaching statement at one point, either in the attempt to get a job or receive promotion/tenure. Professor Kevin Haggerty, at the University of Alberta, claims that "Teaching Statements are Bunk."

Haggerty says,

The first suspicion that there is something insincere about teaching statements derives from the fact that almost every author professes to love teaching. Cumulatively, this pandemic of instructional ardor strikes a dissonant note when compared with the routine activities of academics, many of whom spend an inordinate amount of energy trying to secure release time from teaching. That is, when they're not complaining about the petty hassles of coordinating teaching assistants, dealing with "grade grubbers," writing reference letters for undergraduates they could barely identify in a police lineup, evaluating essays, ordering textbooks, completing copyright permission forms, revising syllabi, learning the latest instructional software, and worrying about the time all of that takes away from other academic pursuits. Such grumblings dominate the hallway conversations of most faculty members I know.

...This, then, is a plea for greater specificity in reflections on the techniques and tactics used in teaching. I have learned almost nothing useful from the smattering of statements that I have read, but my students and I have benefited enormously from pragmatic lessons that colleagues have passed along about how they coordinate assignments over the course of a term, train teaching assistants, craft course outlines, remember students' names, and organize online resources.

Haggerty argues that we should be concrete when constructing teaching statements, rather than speaking in general and nearly universally-expressed abstractions. I think he's right in many ways, but then the crafting of a teaching statement is nearly useless, and perhaps irrational to require, of a job applicant with limited teaching experience (say, a freshly-minted PhD). On second thought, it might be quite reasonable to require such a statement from a new PhD, because it may be more difficult to give concrete and pragmatic lessons learned about teaching rather than the standard general claims about "instilling a love for philosophy in my students," "not teaching them what to think, but how to think," "showing students the relevance of philosophy," and other such statements contained within the standard teaching statement.

The Myth of the "Life of the Mind"

Thomas Benton at the Chronicle of Higher Education has written a thought provoking piece on the culture of humanities graduate schools and its resistance to bridging the gap between being practical and living the "life of the mind". Is it disconcerting that humanities graduate schools often neglect giving practical advise to their students regarding the difficulties inherent in getting a humanities teaching post? What are the responsibilities of professors/advisors? Is the professor/student paradigm in place at most institutions antiquarian? What if anything can/should be done?